When comparing Filter Forge vs Material Maker, the Slant community recommends Material Maker for most people. In the question“What are the best programs to create procedural textures?” Material Maker is ranked 2nd while Filter Forge is ranked 6th. The most important reason people chose Material Maker is:
Material Maker allows exporting materials ready to use in Unreal, Unity, Unity HDRP and Godot instantly.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Not only a Photoshop plugin, has a lot of other hosts
Pro Several filters
Filter Forge includes a lot of filters and each of them has several presets. Filters are grouped into different categories (Organic, Patterns, Creative, Distortions, Photo, etc...) so it's easy to locate them.
Pro Large online library of filters
The website has thousands of filters available for download. This is the only thing that makes the basic edition feasible.
Pro Standalone application or PhotoShop plugin
Filter Forge can be used as both a standalone application and as a plugin for PhotoShop.
Pro One-click PBR material export to pupular game engines
Material Maker allows exporting materials ready to use in Unreal, Unity, Unity HDRP and Godot instantly.
Pro Full GPU acceleration
All the nodes are actually shaders, so Material Maker works as fast as your GPU. For complex operations like blurring a buffer is used, but you can add a buffer node yourself to further optimize the texture generation.
Pro Free as in Freedom
Open-source and completely free to use.
Pro Powerful nodes
Material Maker has a lot of interesting nodes that together allow artists to create amazing materials. You'll find many nodes similar to what Substance Designer offers.
Pro Easy to create new nodes
All nodes are made in GLSL and are editable.
Pro Inputs are functions
This means that nodes can use sub input graphs as part of their behavior to make complex stuff like raymarching or fractals.
Cons
Con Slow development cycle
New versions come fast enough, but for example, the beta version of 7 doesn't have a lot that 4 didn't have.
Con No free tier
Filter Forge is not free. The basic edition (cheapest one) is $149. It does go on sale regularly though for around $30.
Con Hefty price tag
Its $399 for the professional version, whereas a big competitor used by large studios is only $149.
Con No proper funding and development
Maintained by author rodzill4 as a hobby, the project doesn't have any serious structure or long-term funding whatsoever.
Con UI needs work
Using the node editor with a very complex graph gets difficult - using node groups is recommended to mitigate this problem.
Con Export to
Con Should aim at a more professional goal
The project should consider becoming serious, and aim for not just indie but more professional users because that's the only thing can keep a project prevail.
Con Lack of learning resources
Con Lack of course or training
Given different workflow from Substance, there should be courses on different aspects.
